The Chesterfield

Sometimes Grandmother—

when she crosses her legs in the hardened divot of the Chesterfield

and holds a felt coaster to her temple as a shade—

calcifies.

And as Laura Ingraham reruns… rerun,

fungi erupt like broken china from her lower left thigh;

lichen shales like peeling skin after a sunburn;

algae pools like October rain. 

On Tuesdays, the hairdresser makes a house call

to quaff a boy-cut from pincushion moss and

on Thursdays, the gardener waters with a spray nozzle and

somedays, her daughter (standing in the doorframe)

asks Grandmother what she ate for lunch that day.

The figure creaks and groans under the weight of memory—

sputtering and babbling and confused and dismayed and

defeated, she offers a frustrated apology.

Her daughter dies—a little bit, on the inside.

But ask her, instead, about crawling

through the passageways of the pyramids or strolling

through pre-tragedy Tiananmen Square and watch

as the clay sheers from her face and

wrinkled skin dials back to a Galatean youth—

a youth who quips quick comebacks

and jests

“Well, you’re a lot handsomer than my cane.” 

or

“Well, I might just throw this remote ‘cross the room at ya.”

And laugh a little bit and

stop asking the magnolia what it had for breakfast or lunch or dinner.

Just take its sweet, southern, bruised bloom and

cradle it in a crystal bowl full of tap water and 

please, Mom—

don’t move the statue somewhere where they won’t know

which stories to hear for the thousandth time or 

where the hairdresser can’t stroll in with bonsai shears and

where no one will chip away to her true, deep smile and

I come home from college to see that

deep, weathered divot,

in that cream-colored Chesterfield couch

lost to time.